For this week’s critical play, I played Return to Monkey Island (2022). I played the original game, The Secret of Monkey, when I was a kid and it shaped my lifelong sense of humor and love for puzzles. I think Return to Monkey Island pays perfect homage to the original game with a stronger narrative. While I don’t want to spoil major plot beats, there will be a few spoilers while I describe puzzles.
The newest game is still a point-and-click adventure where the player has to find and use funny objects to complete pirate tasks, like sailing your ship, drinking grog, and defeating evil undead pirates! In this sense, the original “meta” style of comedy remains. For example, in the first part of the game, you need to sneak onto Captain LeChuck’s ship as a scrubbie (someone who mops the deck). To do so, you need a mop. You go to the cook in the Scumm Bar (an old friend) to borrow his mop, but he insists that you need to make your own. So you go through a few other tasks to find the Mop Tree of Melee Island… which you destroy in the process. With your mop in hand, you’re (almost) ready to get on LeChuck’s ship. This style of “puzzle” ties together narrative and task to make you feel like you’re going through this story with Guybrush. This is fitting, as the entire game is framed as a story Guybrush is telling to his son, Boybrush. I think this is really cute as well.
While I think the mechanics of the game work with the narrative structure, the comedy elements sometimes make the puzzles a little… non-intuitive. As another example, one later puzzle requires you to find a flower in the forest that Guybrush describes as having “one million teeth like needles.” The Voodoo Lady sends him to find the “Bite of a Thousand Needles,” but there’s no guarantee that you would have already found and investigate that flower. This left me a little frustrated, since the challenge doesn’t feel like a test of skill, but rather of clicking on everything in sight. This was an issue in the rest of the games as well. However, it is a lot less frustrating in Return to Monkey Island because the player’s movement is a lot faster (and less restricted), so wandering is a lot less of a time investment than in the original game (investigating dead ends is less constly). I suppose that’s why the developers have a “casual” gamemode, for players who don’t want to be confused on that level of detail.
At the end of this game, you do find the secret of Monkey Island. It was exactly what I expected, in the best way possible. It was a lovely way to wrap up the series and reflect how its audience (and developers) have grown over the years. This newest game creates just as much fantasy and narrative fun, although it’s a little less challenge.
